how to write a grant

by Janine Vanderburg, Founder, Joining Vision and Action

How to Write a Grant that Will Get Funded

In the 1990s, I stumbled across Eleanor Burns’ Make a Quilt in a Day television series. As someone who had spent long hours creating quilts, I was instantly intrigued. The secret, it turned out, was a system of quickly cutting and assembling fabric into quilt tops, followed by tying the top to the batting and lining in lieu of the more time-consuming hand quilting.

The series got me thinking about how to write a grant and what led me to develop JVA’s Write a Grant in a Day class. In this workshop, we share the systems and processes we use to teach others that we’ve learned in our years of successes turning out powerful first drafts of grant proposals. In this blog, I’ll share some of our tips about how to write a grant.

  • Assemble your materials before you start so that you don’t have to stop and get up to find stuff, ensuring that you’ll get distracted. Handy materials to have on hand include your organization’s strategic plan, program descriptions, outputs and outcomes, and budgets. Keep a list handy to identify what’s missing as you are drafting your proposal so that you can keep going and fill in later.
  • Identify your key theme or focus of the proposal. In school, you might have called this your thesis. At JVA, we call it our “theory of the grant.” This will organize your thoughts throughout the draft and make it easy to decide what to include or what not to include. (Hint: if a piece of information does not advance your theory of the grant, leave it out.)
  • Create an outline before you start writing. In the Write a Grant in a Day class that we offer in Colorado, we use the Colorado Common Grant Application as the “how to write a grant” outline, ensuring that training participants leave with a solid draft that they will be able to submit to multiple funders.
  • Keep your hand moving. This tip, from Taos author Natalie Goldberg, ensures that you don’t let your “inner editor” get in the way of getting words down on the page. Don’t let perfectionism interfere with the goal of having a complete first draft by the end of the day that you can then go back to, revise and edit.
  • Block the day, and then time block within that day. Block out a full day to write the proposal. Leave away messages on  your phone and email, as though you were out of the office. Better yet, do this outside of the office to block interruptions. For each section of your outline, block off a specific amount of time. Set a timer to let you know when the time for that section is done. Allow yourself 5-10 minute stretch breaks between sections. Take a lunch break—you need to stay fueled.
  • Do it with others. Research shows that projects like this are more likely to be completed when there is group accountability built in. Set a time when you can work on a project like this with a group of colleagues.
  • Don’t wait to get started. Having a terrific template proposal makes the rest of your grantwriting life easier, ensuring that you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

Want some support, instruction, fellowship to get started learning how to write a grant? Join a member of our ace grants team at Write a Grant in a Day. This will be an unprecedented opportunity to write your proposal in a day and to ask questions of a professional grants team member as you go along.